Youth and Sexuality in the Twentieth-Century United States

John C. Spurlock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138817487
• eBook ISBN: 9781317595762
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

When did the sexual revolution happen? Most Americans would probably say the 1960s. In reality, young couples were changing the rules of public and private life for decades before. By the early years of the twentieth century, teenagers were increasingly free of adult supervision, and taking control of their sexuality in many ways. Dating, going steady, necking, petting, and cohabiting all provoked adult hand-wringing and advice, most of it ignored. By the time the media began announcing the arrival of a 'sexual revolution,' it had been going on for half a century.

Youth and Sexuality in the Twentieth-Century United States tells this story with fascinating revelations from both personal writings and scientific sex research. John C. Spurlock follows the major changes in the sex lives of American youth across the entire century, considering how dramatic revolutions in the culture of sex affected not only heterosexual relationships, but also gay and lesbian youth, and same-sex friendships. The dark side of sex is also covered, with discussion of the painful realities of sexual violence and coercion in the lives of many young people. Full of details from first-person accounts, this lively and accessible history is essential for anyone interested in American youth and sexuality.

1 WORK, PLAY, AND SEX PLAY

DOI: 10.4324/9781315745596-2

BLINKER: Where do you see these—these men? At your home?

FLORENCE: Of course not. I meet them just as I did you. Sometimes on the boat, sometimes in the park, sometimes on the street.

BLINKER: Do you allow them [to kiss you]?

FLORENCE: Some. Not many. They won’t take you out anywhere unless you do.

BLINKER: Why don’t you entertain your company in the house where you live?

FLORENCE: If you could see the place where I live you wouldn’t ask that.

O’Henry, “Brickdust Row” (1906)

Blinker, in O’Henry’s story, represents the adult world that dimly but inevitably recognizes that a new sexuality has taken shape among urban young people. Florence takes a certain delight in shocking him, telling him that she goes out unaccompanied and intends to meet men when she does; she expects men to treat her, and she makes her own decisions about kissing them as repayment. In a few words, and without any sense of shame, she describes the new rituals of heterosexual “dating” and “treating,” both considered provocative and morally tainted practices by middle-class adults. American youth, in a single generation, elaborated a new, distinctive heterosexuality. Youthful sexuality changed in profound ways more than once during the twentieth century, but the most rapid and profound transformations came during the half-century after 1900. We can quickly gain a sense of how much changed, and how rapidly, by a short examination of the lives of two young women living in the 1890s.

Rahel Golub left that Russian Pale of Settlement in 1892, at age 12, to join her father in America. She worked at one sweatshop after another to supplement their savings so that the whole family could be reunited on the Lower East Side in New York City. The work affected her health. Often sick, she became an object of concern for her family. A neighbor in their tenement suggested she had a cure for Rahel’s persistent illness. Not long after this her mother sent her on the usual shopping errands but had her go out of her way to buy sugar at a shop she had not visited before. Two days later, her mother asked her, “Well, what do you think of that young man?” Rahel had hardly noticed the youth who had handed over the sack of sugar.

That Saturday she saw the young man, Israel, for the second time in her life when he came to her home with his uncle. “I shrank behind my mother and a cousin,” Rahel recalled. Once past the formal introductions, everyone sat down, with her father and the boy’s uncle sitting across from one another “and at once began a lively conversation to which the rest of us sat and listened respectfully.” As the conversation continued, and the uncle raised the issue of making a match, Israel asked Rahel to go for a walk. Observing him, she thought, “It seemed quite natural that he should sit with his neck shrunk into his collar and keep his hat on like the two older men and be quite as old-fashioned as they were.” Once outside on their walk, Israel seemed pleasant enough. Two days later the uncle sent a message saying that his family was prepared to make an “alliance.” A match-maker followed this message, and soon an engagement ceremony.¹

The experiences of another girl a few years later, far to the west of the Lower East Side, offered a startling contrast to Rahel’s courtship. Blanche Drew and her cousin Suzanne caused a stir among the young men of Ethel, Missouri, during Blanche’s visit there. They vied to spend time with the cousins at Suzanne’s house, with as many as eight young men there at one time. Blanche and Suzanne, of course, loved all the attention. But Suzanne’s mother had a different sense of how the girls managed their social lives. She complained to Blanche’s stepmother that she was at a loss to know what to do. “Every night she and Suzanne have the parlor full of company—I really don’t know how to keep track of all the boys they entertain—I am at my wit’s end to know what to do.”²

Blanche and Rahel lived in different worlds, even if those worlds were contained in the same nation. Neither girl could have changed places with the other one. And their experiences of boys seemed completely unrelated. Blanche would have protested an arranged marriage, even if her family could have conceived of such an idea. Rahel’s family would never have permitted an unfamiliar boy to pay a visit, even if their tiny flat could have accommodated it. Yet both girls participated in courtship rituals with many common features. Boys came to the girls’ homes, where family and friends could watch over the couple and provide opinions as needed, or even if not needed. Although Blanche’s aunt felt that she had lost control over her niece’s social life, she still knew all about Blanche’s activities and had at least the possibility of seeing and meeting all the boys who came to visit her home. Traditional courtship took place in the home, with family either involved or nearby.

Yet in spite of its pervasiveness, family-centered courtship had already begun to disappear by the time Rahel’s family settled in America. The change happened most dramatically in Rahel’s world. Girls began to resist and reject the marriages arranged by family and neighbors—as Rahel eventually did herself. Along with arranged marriage, the practice of chaperonage and domestic courtship also collapsed as older boys and girls began to meet outside their families’ homes to play together in new ways. These new, improvised practices responded to the same shifts in American society that distinguished one segment of childhood as adolescence. Adolescence first became visible in American society as the problem of delinquent boys. Adolescent sexuality also made its appearance as a problem, but as a girl problem.

Youth, Work, Family

“There are many city neighborhoods,” Jane Addams wrote in 1909, “in which practically every young person who has attained the age of fourteen years enters a factory.”³ She wrote at a time when almost 2 million 10- to 15-year-olds worked in the nonfarm sector. In the late nineteenth century, everywhere in the United States, children followed their parents into the kitchens and fields of family farms or into factories, cutting rooms, and even mines to work alongside parents. But when the girl or the boy became a full-time seamstress, factory hand, or apprentice, the child became a contributor to the family income and took her or his place in the family strategy for survival. The child became a young man or woman, a youth, someone with a path to becoming an adult with at least nominal independence. Only a tiny fraction of American young people, mainly middle- and upper-class boys and girls, could ignore the need to earn wages. For the great majority of Americans, work was the common experience of youth.⁴

Even for younger children, wage labor could take a large share of the week. A chart of recommended limits on child employment from the beginning of the twentieth century suggested no more than 15 hours of work per week for eight-to nine-year-olds. The streets of every large city teemed with children peddling wares and with newsies hawking the latest edition of competing dailies. “Their very number makes one stand aghast,” wrote children’s advocate Jacob Riis. After child labor laws set limits on the ages of young workers in the 1890s, Riis found on his tour of sweatshops that many children as young as 12 automatically said they were 14 or 15, sometimes even unasked, to avoid legal complications. Boys not only hawked papers but “shined,” ran errands, worked as printers’ devils, and took on every occupation their size allowed. Girls worked in factories, managed push-carts, or, if needed, watched even younger children so their mothers could work. As late as the 1930s, investigators interviewing girls in the Massachusetts reformatory found that they had “entered gainful employment” at a mean age of 14.9 yrs.⁵

Although reformers in the Progressive Era lamented the hollow looks of girl seamstresses in New York’s garment factories and the breaker boys in Pennsylvania’s anthracite mines, rural children also began work on the family farm as soon as they could help. M. D. Rice, in Georgia, went to work as a child. “I ‘member I was allus strong for a kid and laid off corn ground for Daddy when I wasn’t but twelve years old. … Wasn’t long atter that I was doin’ a man’s work ‘long with Daddy.” Poor southerners shared poverty and backbreaking work in common even if race divided them. A researcher among black sharecroppers in rural Mississippi described one who began “slopping hogs—at the age of 7. Then he learned to cut wood for the stove, and later to milk the cows and feed the mules. At 12 his father and older brother taught him how to plow, but he was 15 before he had full responsibility as a plow hand.” Rural poverty and the hardships of farm life, whether in Galician shtetls or villages on the Middle Border, continued to drive families off the land. Sharecroppers in North Carolina, unable to scrape a living from the soil and caught between landlords and furnishing merchants, entered the textile mills springing up across the New South. For much the same reasons, French Canadians crossed into New England to work in New Hampshire’s Amoskeag mill.⁶

Labor for children began early in their lives and seemingly consumed their youth. Yet their work rarely took them far from home. The example of farm children is the clearest and least surprising. Work meant work around the house, in the kitchen and garden, and eventually (for the boys) in the fields with fathers, brothers, kin, and neighbors. Yet work in cities and village factories also took place in familiar surroundings. Rahel Golub, as a 12-year-old seamstress, earned her first sweatshop wages with her father. When she found other work, she never had to stray far from her neighborhood and, in fact, only went to a distant part of the city later when her health forced her to enter a hospital. One of Riis’s photos shows a family of Bohemian cigar makers—a mother, a father, and a child—all working together in the family’s tiny tenement room, with another young child nearby. Children who worked in the streets usually worked on their own street, or nearby, and they ran with crowds of children who were siblings or neighbors. David Nasaw’s list of well-known people who worked as newsies in early-twentieth-century New York included the Marx brothers and the Warner brothers.⁷

Just as the family provided the context for work, the movement from childhood to youth to adulthood operated through the interplay of family and work. Youth began, with no set boundary, as the child began to contribute to the family income from his or her meager wages and probably left school to make more time for work. Children and youth continued to live at home and only left to establish their own households, typically in their late teens to mid-20s.⁸

Bad Boys and Adolescents

As the twentieth century dawned, however, urban youth began to push beyond this world bound by family, neighborhood, and work. The rapid industrialization of the United States following the Civil War transformed the countryside along with the cities. But the cities rapidly gained on rural areas in population as immigrants arrived and often settled in their search for work. H. W. Lytle and John Dillon’s pre–World War I tract on white slavery played on the theme of innocent young women, new arrivals to the city, taken into the whirl of social life in the big city and suddenly losing themselves without kin or real friends to protect them. These youth might arrive from the countryside, where Blanche and Suzanne lived or the one where Rahel was born. In the decades leading up to World War I, 18 million immigrants arrived in the United States and settled overwhelmingly in America’s industrial cities. Urban life became more crowded and more diverse. And as families either arrived or grew rapidly, urban life also became much younger.⁹

Children living in the cities were visible not just to curious reformers, reporters, and social workers who searched them out in their workplaces. Children spent a lot of time on the streets, playing, working, and finding mischief. Older children who worked for wages, after making contributions to the family fund, had income enough to escape the crowded apartments where family members and boarders lived and to partake of whatever excitement they could find on the sidewalks of New York or Chicago. “They demand pleasure,” Jane Addams wrote of these youth, “as the right of one who earns his own living.”¹⁰

However natural or predictable the youthful fascination with excitement might seem in retrospect, in the late nineteenth century, middle-class city dwellers reacted with suspicion and concern. Youth became visible as a problem. In 1904 G. Stanley Hall would make adolescence the standard term in social science, and ultimately in general usage, for late childhood. Adolescence, Hall wrote, was a “new birth,” marked by rapid growth, restless energy, and awkwardness. He also joined the new term to the search for excitement and trouble. Among other animal species, he wrote, youth “is the age when males engage in conflicts for females and develop organs of combat …” Among human creatures, the restlessness and combativeness of this period led to social problems: “adolescence is preeminently the criminal age.”¹¹

If the new criminal class belonged to a certain age range, it also belonged almost exclusively to one gender. Adolescents were boys “overborne by their own undirected and misguided energies,” Jane Addams wrote in 1909. As the paragraph continues, she refers only to boys with their “obstreperousness,” their “impulsive misdeeds,” their “appetites.” She catalogued the trouble boys found as they “followed their vagrant wills unhindered:” setting fires, stealing, throwing stones at trains, loafing on the docks, petty larceny (like cutting telephone wires under a sidewalk and selling them), “‘wandering spells,’” carrying and using guns, taking cocaine, playing tricks. Harpo Marx recalled of his early-twentieth-century boyhood that “[i]ndividually and in gangs we accounted for most of the petty thievery and destruction of property on the upper East Side.”¹²

The category that applied most generally to “boy crimes” was “incorrigibility,” and might include fighting, begging, gambling, or even loafing. “When the child ceases to be a source of income because he will not work and has to be supported,” wrote Jacob Riis, the “father surrenders him as a truant and incorrigible.” One mother took her son to court on this charge because he continue...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 Work, Play, and Sex Play
• 2 The New Youth and the Domestication of Dating
• 3 Companionate Sexuality
• 4 The Sexual Evolution
• 5 Controlling Youthful Bodies
• Conclusion
• Index